How do I deal with blog comment fragmentation?

July 28, 2011 9:46 AM

How do I deal with blog comment fragmentation? I use Twitterfeed to feed my (Blogger) entries over to Facebook, so my friends playing ant farm or whatever the hell they do on FB can read my stuff. But some people comment on the blog, others comment on FB, and I'd like the blog to be the permanent record of comments. So....is there an alternative besides manually bringing over each new FB comment to my blog (i.e. posting the comment under my own username, with a header of, like, "Shelly says......")?
posted by Quisp Lover to Computers & Internet (4 answers total)

I don't believe there are any viable options for this, nor do I think you get to exercise this level of control. FB doesn't offer any viable tools for porting comments to other platforms, certainly not on a post-by-post basis. Tools like Disqus won't do what you want - they'll let people comment on your blog with their FB credentials but not port FB comments over to your blog. (It will do that for Twitter but not, as far as I know, FB.) There may be other products or plugins that will do this for FB, but I am pretty sure that were this possible, Disqus would be doing it, and they're not.

Facebook is basically a rabbit hole - content goes in to be circulated, shared and commented on within Facebook, but rarely comes back out. That's pretty much just the way it is, and critically is the way people who choose to interact on FB want their interaction to take place.

Please note that you don't have Shelly's permission to repost her comments, so I would not do that.
posted by DarlingBri at 10:07 AM on July 28, 2011 [2 favorites]

Some people on my F-list with this same setup respond to people's comments by asking, "would you mind going over to my blog and saying this there too?" Not sure how successful this would be, but if someone's especially passionate about a subject, they may be more likely to respond at your blog as well.

Also: considering some of the comments I see on facebook, I wonder whether the not-so-passionate responses I see ("lol", or something similarly pithy) would be any great loss if it were missing from your blog anyway.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 10:22 AM on July 28, 2011

Instead of reposting content, have you tried linking to your blog entries on Facebook so that people must click through to read them? Then if they're inclined to comment they'd be more likely to do it on the blog (especially if they can do so with their FB credentials). You'll probably have fewer readers overall though.
posted by ODiV at 10:24 AM on July 28, 2011

Probably the best way to handle this is adding something to your template urging people to comment on the blog. Otherwise, I'm not sure what you're really trying to accomplish with all this effort. People are going to comment where they feel like commenting, or not, in the long run. If you want rich, preservable discussions, you probably want something more like an independent forum.
posted by dhartung at 10:26 AM on July 28, 2011